Tag Archives: TCO

The world’s largest banks have historically relied on mainframes to manage all their transactions and the related cash and profit. In mainframe terms, hundreds of thousands of MIPS are used to keep the mainframe running these transactions, and the cost per MIP can make mainframes extremely expensive to operate. For example, Sears was seeing the overall cost per MIP at $3000-$7000 per year and didn’t see that as a cost-effective way to compete with Amazon. While the price of MIPS has continued to improve, mainframes can also face pure capacity issues.

In today’s world of financial regulations, risk, and compliance, the entire history of all transactions must be captured, stored, and available to report on or search both immediately and over time. This way, banks can meet audit requirements and allow for scenarios like a customer service call that results in an agent search for the transaction history leading up to a customer’s current account balance. The volume of information created across checking, savings, credit card, insurance, and other financial products is tremendous—it’s large enough to bring a mainframe to its knees. Continue reading →

When you are a software company like VMware, you are tied to the success of your partners in the field standing shoulder to shoulder with your customers, guiding them to a successful deployment. Their success and growth directly reflects your customer’s success as your own success in the marketplace.

Partners are focused on solutions that customers care about because it is the only way to stay in business and grow. Today, 10 representatives from technology consulting organizations share their perspectives on how they are using the VMware vFabric Suite to achieve success with customers. Each includes a video or you can visit the full vFabric playlist on VMwareTV.

1. Modernizing Legacy Apps to Cloud and SaaS with vFabric

“In vFabric we see a very attractive modern cloud application platform. So while spring and vFabric represent very attractive alternatives for new application development, what we see with our clients are is the desire to modernize and transform existing applications to take advantage of those same benefits of vFabric. The run time benefits, the design time benefits.”—Chase Crawson, Director of Application Services, CSC Continue reading →

1. So in your previous post, you covered the business case, before and after process, project functionality and scope as well as the results. You had said provisioning time was reduced by 80% and now it’s 90%. How do things keep getting better?
As we evolve and mature, we are able to automate more manual steps like load balancing VIP pool creations and post installation tasks. So, we’ve reduced provisioning time further because of this. If you think about it, most good infrastructure people already look for ways to automate redundant, manual tasks and prefer to run scripts where possible. Our technology let’s people do this on a massive scale, and we just keep finding more places to automate.

2. Besides the fact that you work for VMware and use your own products, why did the CIO or CTO really get behind this project?
Multiple times per year, we were manually provisioning or refreshing about 25 environments across our technology portfolio. We all know manual steps cause problems and are less efficient and effective. In our case, each environment provisioning or refresh cycle could take 3-8 weeks where 15-20 people touched it. Besides the extra operating expense of people’s time, a manual process with lots of hand-offs and touch points is ripe for errors and re-work. I don’t think anyone would disagree that this type of manual process is more prone to errors, incurs more delays, and includes less predictability. For our internal customers in the business and functional areas, the manual process also impacts SLAs. If you factor in compliance, risk management, and security, it’s an area ripe for improvement. Every IT shop faces these issues. Continue reading →

It’s hard to argue that cloud computing has the CIO’s attention across all industries, and a whole new breed of technology companies wouldn’t exist without cloud computing. In this article, we share a summary of six VMware vFabric partner interviews. These perspectives identify 5 themes for how VMware’s vFabric cloud application development platform can improve developer productivity, cut customer technology costs, solve key engineering problems, and more.

What does VMware vFabric have to do with Cloud Application Development?

As the provider of the most popular virtualization and cloud software in the world, VMware understands the cloud journey is not just infrastructure; it’s very much about the applications that run on them. With VMware’s vFabric Cloud Application Platform, VMware is leading the charge to help development teams build, run, manage, and scale cloud-ready applications. vFabric is a group of frameworks, tools, and products that integrate development, infrastructure, and operations. The vFabric cloud application platform incorporates the best of open source stacks (e.g. Apache, Spring, Java, Tomcat, Linux) and provides built-in capabilities for virtualized deployment, scaling, monitoring, dealing with big data, and more.